Edward Steichen is photography's greatest artist
as this large retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of
American Art clearly shows.

During his long career, he not only excelled
in many different genres, creating masterpieces in all, but he
also was exceedingly influential as a curator of photography at
the Museum of Modern Art and as a fashion and celebrity photographer
for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines in the 1920's
and 1930's and he also was an important adviser to the U. S. military
in documentary photography during both World Wars.

To many, his greatest achievements, of course,
are his early Tonalist works, which were very important in elevating
photography into a fine art form, and his celebrity portraits
that stylistically used strong shadows and unusual angles to highlight
his subjects and would have enormous influence on all subsequent
fashion and art photography. Steichen, however, considered his
greatest achievement his mounting of "The Family of Man"
photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

During his long career, Steichen vacillated
between elitist and personal artistic expression and using the
power of photography as a means of mass communication.

"Landscape
with Avenue of Trees," by Edward Steichen, 1902

It is fascinating to note that early in his
career he produced some fabulous Tonalist paintings, several of
which are included in the show and which are quite rare. The only
other artist of his era who also produced fine paintings despite
being an artist of a different art form was Louis Comfort Tiffany,
best known for his stained glass and enamel objets d'art.

Steichen's Tonalist paintings derive in part
from Whistler and George Inness, but they hold their own as extremely
poetic and beautiful images that are surprisingly underappreciated
in most art histories.

In his foreword to the exhibition's quite slim
official catalogue, Warren Anderson, the museum's director, noted
that "A Century ago, as a proponent of Pictorial photography,
Edward Steichen foresaw the limitations of the medium as a documentary
enterprise," adding that "although he eventually rejected
Pictorialism, he remained committed to a redefinition and expansion
of photography as an expressive tool." "His work has
much to teach us today, at a time when photographs are no more
reliable than verbal accounts as evidence of fact," he continued,
referring to the potential of digital photographic techniques
to manipulate images.

"His rejection of fast-developing orthodoxies
about the appropriate limits and features of photography set him
apart from many other photographers, who sought to raise their
medium to the fine art status of painting. Steichen's independent
and egalitarian spirit also puts him more suitably in our time
than his," Anderson wrote.

"Steichen's struggle to harness the power
of photography in the service of art, nature, celebrity, and democracy
are fascinating to us today, fully a century after his career
began. His protean talents are those of a great artist who restlessly
explores new ways of capturing or interpreting the world around
him. And his on-again, off-again engagement with the beau monde
of New York society was leavened by his dedication to a patriotic
vision of American's role on the world stage," Anderson continued.

"In the first two decades of the century,
his softly focused, dreamlike images won photography recognition
as a fine art, but their defiance of the medium's conventions
engendered hostility from purists averse to his painterly manipulation
of prints. After World War I, Steichen came to see photography
as a powerful force in shaping cultural values. He proposed a
new connection between photography and popular culture, embracing
the medium as a vehicle of mass communication, and, frequently,
merging commerce and high art. Once again, Steichen became a lightning
rod for controversy. As he shifted during his sixty-year career
between photography, painting, design, exhibition curating, and
horticulture, he was guided by an unerring instinct for drama
and the use of light and shadow to evoke mood and construct form.
The imagery and message changed, but his work always caught the
mood of its time - from a turn-of-the-century suspicion of reason
and materialism to a glorification of glamour and wealth and,
finally, to a hope for universal brotherhood and the power of
love," wrote Barbara Haskell, the museum's curator of prewar
American art and a leading American art scholar and author of
numerous books, in her appraisal of the photography in the exhibition's
catalogue.

The thin museum catalogue unfortunately only
has a few reproductions that while good give no indication of
the scope of this large exhibition whereas the much more expensive
book by Joanna Steichen has more than 300 fine reproductions,
some of which are not included in the exhibition. Joanna Steichen
was the photographer's last wife and her book includes a great
deal of personal information about him not contained in the museum's
short catalogue.

In an article in The New York Times
October 31, 2000, Ginia Bellafante wrote that Mrs. Steichen has
criticized the Whitney show "for what she says is an overemphasis
on her late husband’s fashion work" and that "she
was also upset that she was not asked to participate in a symposium
on the photographer’s work organized by the curator of the
show." Mrs. Steichen’s book, which is discussed lower
in this article, is quite wonderful and the apparent feud is a
shame.

Haskell notes that after Steichen's death,
"his career has often been condemned as overly theatrical
and commercial," but added that "in the three decades
since Steichen's death, however, the definition of fine art photography
has undergone a radical and expansive transformation" and
"from this new vantage, we can validate Steichen's leveling
of the differences between photographer and artist and between
high and low art."

Indeed, Steichen's transformation from being
a creator of exquisite images of great sensitivity and somewhat
later fashioneer of haute glamor to becoming the organizer of
the famous "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art in 1955 with its rich, multicultural panoply of
the commonality of humanity is certainly a dramatic redemption
from the excesses of the material world to the tissues of civilization.
His art was always civilized but it progressed from the elitism
of the brain to the visceral realities of the heart.

"Edward Steichen's childhood experiences
as a working-class immigrant molded his attitudes toward art.
Born neither to social privilege nor economic security, he saw
art as an essential part of democratic life. Financial necessity
forced him to leave school after the eighth grade and apprentice
to a Milwaukee lithographic firm. There he quickly rose to a position
as designer responsible for the creation of several successful
advertisements….To improve his skills, he persuaded several
friends to rent space in a Milwaukee office building and hire
a model to pose for life drawings," Haskell wrote, added
that by 1900 Steichen "began to win local recognition"
and listed "himself as an artist in the Milwaukee town directory."
By 1895, Haskell continued, Steichen had a 4 x 5 Primo Folding
View Camera and was providing designers at the lithography firm
with photographs they could copy to create ads and poster designs."
Soon, he began to take portraits of Milwaukeeans on his days off
and opened a photography studio with a colleague, Herman Pfeiffer.
Haskell notes that he would discover Camera Notes, a quarterly
publication began by Aldred Stieglitz in 1887 under the auspices
of the Camera Club of New York, which encouraged the use of cameras
to create works of art "rather than utilitarian documents."
"By accident, Steichen discovered that he could achieve the
subdued tones and formal simplicity prized by Pictorialists by
spilling water on the camera lens or shaking the tripod during
exposure" and "he began to experiment with such techniques,
especially in landscape photographs."

"He was particularly partial to dark,
gray days and to twilight, when, as he wrote several years later,
'things disappear and seem to melt into each other, and a great
feeling of peace overshadows all.' Over the next decade, Steichen
increasingly replaced sharply delineated details with indistinct,
suggestive shadows, employing the expressive potential of light
and form to evoke the dreamy mysticism characteristic of Pictorial
photography. Photography as an expressive art was relatively new,
and the field, though expanding, was still sparsely populated.
Steichen's work was therefore highly visible, and he received
quick recognition for his enigmatic records of nocturnal phenomena,"
Haskell wrote.

Clarence H. White, the noted Pictorialist photographer,
noticed some of Steichen's work at an exhibition in Chicago and
wrote to Steichen to encourage him to see Steiglitz, which he
did in April, 1900, enroute to Europe. Stieglitz, who was 15 years
older than Steichen, purchased three of his landscape prints and
agreed to hold several more for possible reproduction in Camera
Notes. "In a now legendary exchange, Stieglitz asked
Steichen whether his study in Paris would cause him to abandon
photography and devote himself to painting. Steichen replied,
'I shall always stick to photography, for there are, in my opinion,
certain pictorial ideas that can be expressed better by photography
than by another 'art medium,'" Haskell wrote.

F. Holland Day, a Pictorial photographer from
Boston, had organized a 400-print exhibition of "The New
School of American Photography" at the Royal Photographic
Salon in London in October, 1900, and included 21 works by Steichen.
The exhibition stirred considerable controversy because English
Pictorial photographers criticized the small scale and multiple
mattes of the American works. The exhibition, Haskell wrote, "catapulted
Steichein into the limelight" and a smaller version of the
show would open soon thereafter in Paris. "His dual role
as painter and photographer was hailed by proponents of Pictorialism
as proof of photography's legitimate status as fine art"
and when the Salon des Champs de Mars in Paris accepted one painting,
six charcoal drawings and ten photographs by Steichen in 1902
"the news galvanized the photographic community and the America
Press," she wrote. "For the first time, photography
had been deemed equivalent to the other pictorial arts. Steichen,
however, had labeled the ten photographs 'engravings,' and when
the jury discovered the ruse, he works were removed before the
show opened," Haskell continued.

The photographs removed had been printed by
Steichen with gum bichromate, a process that permitted the introduction
of color and the intensification, thinning out, shading and removal
of portions of an image with a brush or scraping tool. Several
of such works by Steichen were reproduced in a German photography
journal and the editor was forced to resign over the ensuing controversy,
which only served to make Steichen more famous.

Steichen would soon go on to make photographic
portraits of many famous people, such as George Bernard Shaw,
Henri Matisse, Clarence H. White, William Merritt Chase and August
Rodin and these works manifested his painterly approach to light
and shadows.

"The Flatiron,"
by Edward Steichen, 1904

"Steichen's richly toned, evocative photographs
reflected the yearning in the early years of the twentieth century
to escape from the crass materialism and rationality of the everyday
world into a space of quiet meditation. Pessimism in the late
nineteenth century about traditional religions and technological
progress had given rise to an almost spiritual belief in intuition
and the creative possibilities of the individual. Many artists
turned to intense, private experience for subject matter, embracing
the transient imagery of dreams and the luminous mysteries of
nature. The result was an art of withdrawal and detachment from
the rational world, an art that eschewed precision in favor of
mystery, reason in favor of reverie. The elusive, expression of
dreamlike moods which Steichen achieved by exploiting softly nuanced,
shallow space echoed the sensibility of British Aestheticism and
of French Symbolism - movements which other Pictorial photographers
also used as models for the portrayal of subjective, metaphysical
truths," Haskell observed.

Stieglitz meanwhile formed a new organization,
the Photo-Secession, to promote the expressive potential of photography,
and in March, 1902, held an exhibition, "American Pictorial
Photography," at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Square,
and four months late Stieglitz resigned as editor of Camera Notes
and planned to launch a new quarterly, Camera Work, whose cover,
typeface and layout were designed by Steichen, then only 23 and
recognized as the star of the new movement. Steichen in fact suggested
that Stieglitz rent his own recently vacated studio on the top
floor of 291 Fifth Avenue for the new galleries of the Photo-Secession,
which Stieglitz did and which opened in 1905 with galleries designed
by Steichen in "a spare, simple style reminiscent of the
Viennese Secessionist architecture," Haskell wrote, added
that "Stieglitz likened himself to the conductor of an orchestra,
with Steichen the concert master."

"More than any other photographer, he
stretched the technical parameters of the medium through mastery
of a range of printing processes - platinum, bromide, gum bichromate,
and direct carbon. In addition to his experiments with three-color
prints between 1904 and 1906, he employed virtuoso techniques
in the his black-and-white images, montaging negatives…or
combining several photographic processes to produce unique prints
that could not be duplicated. His ability to apply successive
layers of pigment to gum bichromate or platinum prints yielded
spectacularly toned, chromatic photographs….But such efforts
were time-consuming and few other photographers attempted them,"
Haskell wrote.

He remained committed to painting and while
controversy still waged among purists about his techniques, he
closed his portrait studio to return to Paris and promised Stieglitz
that he would recommend non-photographic art in Europe for exhibition
in New York.

Paris, of course, was now alive with Fauvism
and Cubism and in 1908 Steichen created an organization of progessive
American artists called the New Society of America Artists, and
he developed a close friendship with Rodin and arranged for a
show of his watercolors at Stieglitz's gallery that was now called
291. "Steichen's own aesthetic temperament leaned toward
the voluptuous sensuality of both Rodin and Matisse, another close
friend. The French painter's emotionally expressive Fauvist color
convinced Steichen that the absence of color in photography was
a barrier to the medium's full acceptance as a fine art. Not surprisingly,
he was one of the first to experiment with color lantern slides-
called autochromes - after the Lumière brothers demonstrated
the process in July 1906. That the process was expensive and error
prone and the glass slides it yielded visible only when light
passed through them did not dampen the enthusiasm with which Steichen
and other photographers greeted the new technology….Surprisingly,
Steichen's paintings remained relatively low-toned and conservative
in relation to his color photographs as well as to the art he
was selecting for exhibition at 291. In contrast to the loose
brushwork and high-keyed palette employed by painter colleagues
such as John Marin, Alfred Maurer, and Arthur B. Carles, with
whom he participated in 291's 'Younger American Painters' show
in March, 1910, Steichen's single-toned nocturnal landscapes remained
linked to the smoothly nuanced work of America m painter James
McNeill Whistler….Their appeal to intuition rather than reason
and the intellect found favor with the public, whose purchase
of them provided Steichen's annual living expenses," Haskell
continued.

Steichen was not enthusiastic, about Cubism,
and this would lead to a break with Stieglitz and his last exhibition
at 291 was in 1909. Two years later, he was commissioned, however,
by Paul Poiret, the couturier, to photograph some gowns for the
April issue of Art et Décoration and also received
a commission to create mural paintings for the Park Avenue townhouse
of Agnes and Eugene Meyer, a project, entitled "In Exultation
of Flowers," which occupied him for four years.

"Painted with luminous, brilliant colors
and gold leaf, highly stylized and awash in sinuous lines, the
murals marked the beginning of Steichen's more assertive use of
color and more decorative treatment of the picture surface. Their
synthesis of Pre-Raphaelite female images with modernist stylization
served as a bridge between the idyllic spiritual innocence of
Steichen's Pictorialist art and the glamorous Art Deco elegance
of his work in the next decades," Haskell observed.

The coming of World War I, however, "unleashed
in him a social conscience dormant since his youth in Milwaukee,
when he had participated with his mother and sister in Socialist
organizations," Haskell wrote. Returning to New York, he
found Stieglitz not terribly concerned about the war but had a
successful show at M. Knoedler and Co., in 1915 at which the Meyer
murals were sold. "Even more devastating was the acrimonious
separation that Steichen's wife, Clara, initiated that May and
her subsequent flight to France with one of their two daughters,
Kate," Haskell wrote, adding that he began to take non-Pictorialist
photographs with "strong light-dark contrasts and sharply
focused effects. Three months after the Americans entered the
war, Steichen volunteered for military service despite the fact
that he was eight years over the age limit, and was commissioned
as a first lieutenant in the Photographic Section of the Army
Signal Corps and would oversee aerial photography missions. He
would remain with the Air service in Europe after the Armistice
and eventually returned to Washington, D.C., to establish a permanent
division of aviation photography for the Signal Corps. "His
war experiences with aerial reconnaissance photography had reinforced
…[a] preference for factual accuracy…[and] following
his return to France in the spring of 1920, he renewed his aesthetic
commitment to order and rationalism," Steichen wrote.

He began to experiment with abstract still
lifes and with tonal values. "The exactness and objectivity
with which he presented these fragments of nature attested to
a newfound conviction that the truths photography could best express
were those rooted in external, not internal, reality….In
so doing, he anticipated a younger generation of photographers,
among them Edward Weston, whose work likewise wold portray the
cyclical forces and constant rhythms of nature. Steichen's application
of the impersonal clarity and logic of science extended to painting
as well. Works such as Le Tournesol, featured in the 1922 Salon
d'Automne…, drew on his study of the relationship between
plant structure and plane and solid geometry. Next, using the
geometric ration known as the Golden Section, he created a series
of fifteen tempera paintings, each composed of flat, brightly
colored, geometric shapes….Uninterested in pure abstraction,
he cast these geometric shapes as actors in a children's story,
following the example of his brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, whose
1932 children’s book, Rutabaga Stories, had been greeted
with acclaim by both his family and the public."

Steichen returned to New York in late 1922
and wrote to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Condé Nast's
magazine empire, to correct Vanity Fair's report that he,
though beyond peer as a portrait photographer, had given up the
medium for painting. Fortuituously, Vogue's leading fashion photographer,
Baron Adolph de Meyer, had just defected to a rival magazine and
Crowninshield offered Steichen a contract and he would become
Condé Nast's chief photographer for the next 15 years,
shooting celebrities for Vanity Fair and fashion for Vogue.
As the highest paid photographer in the United States, Steichen's
interest in painting waned to such an extent that he renounced
painting and burned his canvases.

"In his first year at Vogue, Steichen
did little to alter the format he inherited from de Meyer: single
figures wearing decoratively embellished gowns of shimmering fabrics
positioned against richly textured backgrounds. But whereas de
Meyer exploited dramatic backlighting to bathe his models in a
soft glow, Steichen favored sharp-focus lighting and uncluttered
settings. He proposed a new prototype of female beauty. In contrast
to de Meyer's romantic, dreamy women, Steichen's were bold, confident,
and independent….His photographs codified the image of the
liberated woman that emerged after World War I. Their target audience
was not the youth culture of the Jazz Age but its more sophisticated,
older counterpart whose conception of elegance and glamour Steichen's
images helped shape. By the mid-1920s. Steichen had begun to place
his models in unadorned, angular spaces enlivened by slashing
beams of artificial studio light. His appropriation of the straight-edged,
geometric patterning of Art Deco, following the famous Paris 'Exposition
Internationale et Art Décoratifs' in 1925, exerted a pervasive
influence over fashion photography….Ornate curvilinear interiors
gave way to stark geometric backgrounds strikingly delineated
in light and shadow; space was dramatized exclusively with light."

Steichen believed that the mass media was inherently
"populist" and as he became America's "court portraitist,"
"he dropped the props that had signified personality or achievement
in his earlier portraits and highlighted glamour and surface beauty
- legitimizing the very characteristics that had won his sitters
their celebrity …rather than probing the deeper, more complex
realities of their inner lives, he adroitly exploited conventions
of beauty and power to create portraits whose subjects seem at
once familiar and enticingly distanced."

In 1926 and 1927, he was commissioned by the
Stehli Silk Corporation to create fabric designs and his designs
were based on close-up photographs of common objects such as buttons
and thread, matches and matchboxes, lumps of sugar, mothballs,
carpet tacks, thread, and eyeglasses, "Drawing on his experience
with aerial reconnaissance photography, he photographed these
objects from above, thus abstracting the objects and producing
strong shadows that operated as purely formal elements.

Soon, Steichen became in great demand as a
commercial photography by advertisers such as Woodbury Soap, Steinway
Grand Pianos, Mills Towels, Matson Cruise limes, Jergens Lotion
and Kodak. "In visualizing an America populated by beautiful
people, seductive women, contented mothers, happy families, and
desirable products, he translated the American Dream into visual
form.

Douglass Lighters,
by Edward Steichen, 1928

All of this activity, not surprisingly "angered
the art community," especially when he was quoted by Sandburg,
in a book underwritten by J. Walter Thompson, the ad agency, as
a biography of Steichen, as maintaining that not only that 'art
for art's sake was dead - if it ever lived,' but that 'there never
has been a period when the best thing we had was not commercial
art.' Historicall7, art was propaganda and the artist was usually
what we might call a glorified press agent.'" Paul Strand
and Walker Evans, important photographers, would attack Steichen.
Evans would deride Steichen's "special feeling for parvenu
elegance."

In 1938, Steichen announced he would retire
from commercial photography, perhaps a bit in response to a new
generation of fashion photographers like Martin Munckacsi at Harper's
Bazaar, who emphasized an informal, naturalistic style, and
perhaps also in part because other photographers such as Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White were exploring
documentary photography and social commentary. That year Steichen
was particularly impressed with an exhibition sponsored by the
federal Government's Resettlement Administration and Farm Security
Administration documenting the lifestyles of those hit hard by
the Depression.

What was very interesting was that his reaction
was not so much to individual photographs but to the ensemble
of images. "It is not the individual pictures nor the work
of individual photographers that make these pictures so important,
but it is the job as a whole…that makes it such a unique
and outstanding achievement," he would write. Despite a reawakening
of his social consciousness, Steichen concentrated the next couple
of years on raising Delphiniums in West Redding, Connecticut.
After the German invasion of Russia in 1941, however, he tried
unsuccessfully to reactivate his commission in the Army Air Service,
but did organize an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art on
the theme of national defense, which opened in May, 1942, with
the title "Road to Victory." According to Haskell, the
show "presented a new kind of photography exhibition, one
whose emotional power lay in its narrative sequencing and mural0zie
enlargements of prints. Designed by German-born architect Herbert
Bayer, the installation required viewers to follow a prescribed
route on raised ramps, flanked by photomurals…. And text
panels written by Carl Sandburg. The next year, the Navy asked
him to create a unit to help in recruiting pilots and commissioned
him as a lieutenant commander in the Naval reserve and by the
next year his Naval Aviation Photographic Unit expanded to include
wartime naval aviation. Steichen's wartime photographs and those
of the units he would oversee "offer reassuring human interest
views of military teamwork," Haskell dryly noted, adding
that "their affirmative vision testified to Steichen's faith
in the power of community and human cooperation," but not
to the horror of war.

In July, 1947, Steichen was named director
of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.
The previous director, Beaumont Newhall, had resigned in protest
as did all 30 members of the department's advisory committee.
Newhall, Haskell maintained, personally disliked Steichen, whom
he considered self-centered and megalomaniacal."

"During Steichen's fifteen-year tenure
at MoMA, thematic concerns came to predominate. Aesthetic issues
were marginalized as Steichen replaced one-artist shows with group
presentations assembled on the basis of subject matter. Even in
non-thematic surveys of contemporary photographers, he typically
treated prints as conveyors of information rather than as precious
objects by mounting them on thick boards without glass or mats
and clustering them in graphically dramatic arrangements that
resembled magazine layouts. Such orchestrations often overshadowed
the work of individual photographers…..Steichen's showmanship
and populist bias were decried by photographers such as Ansel
Adams, for whom Steichen was the 'anti-Christ' of photography
and his regime a 'body blow to the progress of creative photography.'
Still, Steichen served photography well, encouraging a host of
younger artist by looking at their work, purchasing prints for
the collection and including them in exhibitions. More important,
his vision of photography as a democratic tool of mass communication
attracted a wide popular following to the medium. Never did Steichen
articulate his ambition for photography more forcefully than in
his famous 1955 exhibition 'The Family of Man,' an immense, thematic
presentation that he considered his highest accomplishment as
a creative individual. To organize the extravaganza, Steichen
spent more than three years culling two million photographic submissions.
The 502 photographs he ultimately selected represented the work
of 273 photographers from 68 counties."

The exhibition was mounted by Paul Rudolph,
the architect, and some photographs were suspended on wire and
assembled around 37 themes with texts by Stieglitz colleague and
biographer, Dorothy Norman. "At a time when the atomic bomb's
potential for total world destruction made life seem fragile and
uncertain, he affirmed the essential oneness of humanity and the
universality of everyday experience. By underscoring the shared
values and experiences of humankind and thereby erasing the distinction
between 'us' and ''them,' Steichen sought to further world peace.
It was a message that spoke powerfully to the postwar world. Considered
the major art event of the decade, 'The Family of Man' enjoyed
record attendance,,,,..Criticism of the show's sentimentality
gained momentum after 1960, as Americans came to question the
exhibition's comforting view of life. In retrospect, 'the Family
of Man' closed an ideological era that had flourished in the forties
films of Hollywood directors Frank Capra and John Ford. In the
era of civil rights activism, anti-Vietnam War protests, and countercultural
rebellion - when moral certainties and a belief in human beneficence
yielded to uncertainty and disillusionment - the exhibition was
scorned for its maudlin humanism and implicit neocolonial assumption
that everyone held the values and expectations of the middle-class
American family…..modernist purity came to dominate art world
politics and Steichen became an object of vilification."

Steichen's Legacy

Zest

Joanna Steichen's book is vastly more beautiful
and interesting than the museum's rather brief catalogue of the
exhibition.

She was the photographer's third wife and widow.
When they met at "21" in 1959, she was 26 and working
for the Young & Rubicam advertising agency as the chief television
copywrighter for the American Airlines account, and he was the
Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern
Art. The lunch was to launch a series of recordings by Carl Sandburg,
the poet, for use on an all-night radio program, and Steichen
and Sandburg were leaving later that day for Moscow. Sandburg
had married Steichen's sister, Lillian, who was known as Pausl,
in 1910.

Joanna Taub Steichen had seen the photographer's
famous exhibition, The Family of Man, in 1955 at the Museum of
Modern Art, and describes it in her book as "a dramatic hymn
to life celebrating the needs, pleasures, griefs and transitions
common to people of many different classes and cultures all over
the world," adding that the paperback catalogue of the exhibition
"had become a bible for advertising copywriters like myself."

She was thrilled by Steichen, who died in 1973
two days short of his 94th birthday, and they would soon get involved:
"We shared righteous patriotrism and the wish to make something
beautiful, concepts considered admirable in the first two thirds
of the twentieth century, not consigned, as they seem now, to
the superficial and cosmetic or to the jingoistic and paranoid,
but broad and respectable expressions of appreciation and hope.
Passion, too, was an acceptable phenomenon then."

"With the validation of experience behind
him, he exuded confident pleasure in life and its possibilities.
All his long life, he had been restless, inquisitive, searching
or meaning, driven to master technical processes and the workings
of nature. The perspective of those many years was part of the
attraction. So was his ability to retain qualities we associate
with youth: awe, zest, rapture over the tallest tree or the biggest
dog, a fine face of a sleek convertible, a musical phrase, a new
use for a particular slant of light. Best of all, his capacity
for perpetual wonder was balanced by a healthy irreverence for
pretension and cant," she wrote.

Her book is divided into many sections with
photographs organized mostly by subject with introductory commentaries
by her that are very incisive and sophisticated and great reading.

"To a man who could charm almost anyone
and master any task that engaged his imagination," she wrote,
"courtship came easily….We were married on Saturday
afternoon March 19, 1960….We celebrated with Steichen's favorite
brand of champagne, Lanson….Steichen had been accustomed
all his life to concentrate fiercely, proudly, on his own interests….He
once told me, long after we were married, that what he wanted
from any person in his household was quiet, dog-like devotion….He
expected me to take over the bookkeeping and other paperwork and
to be available all day, every day, to assist him on his projects.
If I took an hour longer than usual for household errands, he
would transpose his anxiety into gruff reproaches that, at first,
reduced me to tears."

She provides an excellent overview of his life:

"He had started in his teens as a nineteenth-century
romantic determined to prove that a photograph could be a work
of art, and he was going strong in his eighties as the high priest
of photography's mission to enhance human life through understanding.
In his twenties, he became known for moody, mysterious photographs
designed to compete with paintings and printed in time-consuming,
multilayered techniques. Some observers had found their innovative
compositions shocking, and other s had hailed them as the emergence
of a new genius….Steichen was in demand as a portratist in
the first decade of the twentieth century and again in the 1920s,
when the higher he raised his fees, the grater the demand for
booking s become.. In his early forties, after World I, he decided
the work for which he had was known had become pointless. Profoundly
shaken by firsthand experience with war's indiscriminate destruction
and stung by a scandal preceding his divorce from his first wife,
he chafed at the self-absorbed concerns of artist and patrons.
He wanted to reach a much larger public and to say something that
mattered. He decided to learn everything there was to know about
the technical aspects of photography. He assigned himself a new
apprenticeship in technical precision, photographed a white cup
and saucer a thousand times and went on to symbolic still lifes
and intense studies in scale…After three self-imposed years
of retooling, he decided to redirect his energy to the photograph's
potential as a medium for mass communication. From that period
on, he referred to his fine individual prints, as well as to his
paintings, as 'expensive wallpaper for rich people's houses.'
...After that, he raised fashion photography to a high plane of
elegance for Vogue, set up improvisations for Vanity
Fair designed to transmit the essence of a play or a personality
in a single image, made photomurals for Radio City's Center Theater
and, at a considerable profit to himself, pioneered the use of
lively, naturalistic photographs in advertising….He was a
star of the avant garde, but both the general public and the majority
of connoisseurs considered photography a utilitarian, relatively
low-cost means of obtaining likenesses rather than a viable art
form. Steichen's claim that his photographs were art carried a
little more weight because he was respected as a painter. In fact,
painting provided most of his livelihood. But in 1923, he took
another of the grand risks that shaped his career. Innovative
and proficient as he might be, he deicided he did not have the
imagination of a great painter. In a characteristic dramatic gesture,
he made a bonfire of all the paintings in his studio on the prpperty
in leased in Voulangis, in France, from 1908 to 1923. Between
1905 and 1914, Steichen served as European art scout for Alfred
Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession…Among the exhibitions Steichen
arranged were works by Matisse in 1908, Alfred Maurer and John
Marin in 1909, Cézanne in 1910, E. Gordon Craig in 1910,
Max Weber in 1911, Picasso in 1911, Arthur B. Carles in 1912 and
Constantin Brancusi in 1914."

Steichen's career is fascinating because it
was so long and influential, because it changed course quite often,
and because it was not content with mere success. Steichen, a
non-stop smoker, had "an urgent, lifelong mandate for accomplishment,"
his widow wrote: "He learned early the importance of attracting
attention and patronage by producing something astonishing. He
was first recognized as an artist of exceptional ability at age
nine, when he traced a complex drawing and presented it as his
original work. All his life, he seized the advantage of being
the first to use a new technique or to apply an old one in a new
way. As a schoolboy, it occurrred to him to put his new bicycle
to work and become the fastest Western Union messenger in Milwaukee.
At fifteen, as a lowly apprentice, her persuaded his employer
that lithographs of livestock based on his own photographs of
local examples would attract more customers than the stylized
illustrations then used to publicize farm products. When he Lumière
brothers, the investors of an early and beautiful color process,
made their autochrome plates available for sale for the its time
in 1907, Steichen came close to cornering the market in Paris
and arranged quickly to show the successful results. In the 1920's
when most advertisers still relied on drawings for illustration,
Steichen convinced the J. Walter Thompson agency that the photograph
offered greater immediacy and connection with the consumer….For
his early landscapes, he evolved painterly results out of technical
accidents such as raindrops on the lens or a foot jiggling the
tripod."

Agnes Ernst Meyer,
the Girl from The Sun, by Steichen, 1910

Near the end of his life, Steichen was thinking
of doing a thematic photographic exhibition on "Woman,"
but his oeuvre is hardly negligent on that subject. Steichen,
for example, met Agnes Ernst several years before her 1910 marriage
to Eugene Meyer, who became an important patron. She became a
regular visitor to Stieglitz's "291" gallery "where
because of her Valkyrean beauty, her intellect and her newspaper
reporter's job with the New York Sun, she was known as the Girl
from the Sun," Joanna Steichen wrote."

Isadora Duncan
at the Portal of the Parthenon, Athens, 1921, by Edward Steichen

"Steichen," she continued, "claimed
to be the only male friend of Isadora Duncan who never quarreled
with her because he was the only one who did not have an affair
with her; for earthy romance, he chose one of her pupils."
"In 1921, Steichen happened to vacation in Venice at the
same time as Isadora Duncan. She was on her way to Greece with
her pupils, who were also her adopted daughters, known as the
Isadorables. She persuaded Steichen to come along by promising
that she would let him make motion pictures of her dancing on
the Acropolis. Once there. She changed her mind. Her style in
movement and costume was based on classic Greek imagery and, faced
with the real thing, she was overwhelmed. Steichen settled for
borrowing a Kodak camera from the headwaiter at his hotel. Standing
among the ancient, sacred stones of the Acropolis, Isadora felt
she was too much an intruder to move, but finally she managed
to produced the two appropriate classic gestures that Steichen
recorded."

"Steichen's predecessor at Condé
Nast, Baron de Meyer," Joanna Steichen wrote, "produced
precious, frilly images. Both the women and the clothes appeared
giddy and trivial. Steichen, in contrast, had an innate sense
of style that already served him well in portraits and was ideally
suited to the impression of upper-class authority that Vogue tried
to project. Steichen's women, from Edwardian grandes dames to
sophisticated habitues of the salon and the speakeasy, were bold,
graceful and elegant….His favorite model was Marion Morehouse.
According to Steichen, she cared as little about fashion as he
did in private life, but she had a fine actress's capacity to
become whichever person the clothes she modeled required. Once,
Steichen suggested making a series of nude photographs. Morehouse
agreed and posed wearing only long black gloves and stockings.
Later, Steichen heard that she had married. To save her any possibility
of future embarrassment, he destroyed the negatives of the nude
sitting. Then he learned that she had married the avant garde
bohemian poet e. e. cummings, who Steichen believed, would have
relished the pictures…."

Breadline on
Sixth Avenue, New York, circa 1930, by Edward Steichen

Steichen had a studio in the artists' studio
building on the southeast corner of 40th Street and the Avenue
of the Americas from 1923 to 1934 and from there he observed the
breadlines by the El, shown above in a very strong composition.

Alexander Woollcott,
New York, 1933, by Edward Steichen

Steichen's celebrity portraits,
such as Alexander Woollcott, above, or Noel Coward, below, are
especially memorable for the unusual poses of the sitters and
lighting dynamics.

Noel Coward,
by Edward Steichen, 1932

Not all are formal, such as his portrait of
George Gershwin, below, and sometimes they were taken under deadline
pressure, as in the case of Greta Garbo, as Joanna Steichen's
book makes clear. There is a four-section, 1931, portrait of Charles
Chaplin that is highly amusing as the famous actor and comic uses
his cane to magically shoot away his bowler hat. Another portrait
of Chaplin, taken the same year, is very incisive and pensive
and warm and is very nicely placed opposite a lovely and sensitive
portrait of Katharine Cornell, the famous actress, as part of
a portrait series of actors doing "improvisations."
While some of the famous celebrity portraits capture their subjects
in classic poses that wonderfully encapsulate their personality,
others delve deeper, such as his 1935 portrait of Charles Laughton,
the actor, whose focus away from the camera is intriguing and
confident, but also a bit sad and arrogant and uncomfortable,
a superb snapshot of one of the century's greatest actors. Another
great photograph is "Stieglitz and Kitty," taken in
1904, a very unconventional photograph that shows the proud dignity
and poise of the young girl and the affectionate regard of her
by Stieglitz off to the site, a stunning composition. Steichen's
composition can be very subtle as in his 1928 portrait of Lili
Damita in which she is standing to the right of a glass table
with a white bowl. She is dressed in a white gown with a dark
mantle over her left shoulder. She is leaning slightly against
the table and the table reflects and reverses her curves, a very
refined touch.

George Gershwin,
1927 photograph by Steichen shown in open book, "Steichen's
Legacy," in shopwindow of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue

Many of Steichen's
famous portraits, including Gary Cooper, the actor, in 1928, top
left, are shown in shopwindow of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue

Steichen took
many superb urbanscapes including these of the George Washington
Bridge, 1931, shown in a shopwindow of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth
Avenue

His urban photographs are very
strong and quite the equal of Paul Strand's great urban work.
"The Brooklyn Bridge," taken in 1903, is particularly
striking in its asymmetrical composition and great tonality. Similarly,
his vistas of the new George Washington Bridge in 1931, shown
above, are brilliant in their clarity and unusual compositions.

U.S.S. "Lexington"-
Getting Ready for a Big Strike on Kwajalein, 1943, by Edward Steichen
in open page of "Steichen's Legacy" book in a shopwindow
of Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue

Steichen served in both World Wars and he noted
that people often force themselves to try to forget pictures of
extreme violence. His photograph of sailors aboard the Lexington
aircraft carrier in World War II, shown above, is a sensational
photograph of great power, mystery, and grace, and one of the
great surprises of the exhibition as is a documentary movie he
supervised of bombing runs.

Another remarkable and startling picture is
"Wind Fire - Maria-Theresa Duncan on the Acropolis,"1921,
a picture that conjures the flourishes of Loie Fuller a generation
earlier but which captures the "special effect" of a
lengthy time exposure that ripples the dancer's dress in the wind.

"Striped Gown," a 1935 photograph,
is a dazzling composition that predates Orson Welles great hall
of mirrors scene in "The Lady From Shanghai" and the
great mirror battle by Bruce Lee in "Enter the Dragon."

People, of course, were not his only interest.
He actually was very much interested in nature and took many pictures
of a single tree near his home and of many flowers that he grew.
The flower pictures get a disproportionate amount of attention
in both books and are nice, but not exceptional, but some of his
landscapes and abstractions are remarkably powerful. "Spectacle
Butterfly," a 1926 picture, is quite astoundingly abstract
and beautiful, and "The Garden of the Gods, Colorado,"
a 1906 picture, is hauntingly beautiful and dramatic.

The large exhibition and both books, but especially
Joanna Steichen's, clearly justify Steichen's stature as America's
greatest photographer. He was a great Tonalist painter. He was
highly influential in making photography be considered a fine
art. He was importantly instrumental in introducing many major
modern painters to the United States in his association with Alfred
Stieglitz, his only rival as a photographer for greatness above
and beyond photography. He was unsurpassed as a portraitist of
famous people. He was deeply involved with changing the aesthetics
of published advertising and with setting a new standard for "upper
class" elegance as director of photography at Vogue
and Vanity Fair in their glory years. He served patriotically
in two World Wars and gave up much of his personal career to head
up the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, culminating
in his famous exhibition, The Family of Man, probably the most
popular photography exhibition of all time, that emphasized his
belief that photograph should be used as an important means of
mass communication. In his review of the exhibition in The
New York Observer Nov. 20, 2000 critic Hilton Kramer said
that he harbored a tendency "to feel that The Family of
Man was the single worst thing ever to be inflicted upon the
art of photography," adding that "it still strikes me
as progressive cant from start to finish, with its phony parallels
of 'families' the world over and its reduction of all human life
to a few simple-minded liberal formulas." The exhibition
at the Whitney goes to great lengths to reproduce part of The
Family of Man exhibition and Kramer, who usually rants correctly,
and brilliantly, over the overly intellectual claptrap of many
exhibitions, is mistaken here in diminishing the stunning impact
that Steichen's exhibition had, far, far in advance of the politically
correct multiculturalism of recent years.

Some photographers and critics have carped
that Steichen was merely shrewd and capitalized in staying up
with trends. His oeuvre, of course, overwhelms such petty analysis.
It is stunning, even if one takes away the celebrity portraits
and The Family of Man exhibition.

Certainly, his priority were his own interests
and advances as both books make clear. I only met him once at
a party in honor of Sophia Loren, the actress, at the Museum of
Modern Art. I was sitting alone with her at a small table in the
garden discussing art when Rene d'Haroncourt, the museum's director,
brought over Steichen to introduce him to the famous actress.
Steichen was one of the most recognizable figures at this quite
grand occasion with his long white beard. I immediately stood
up and offered to relinquish my seat, but he gestured no and simply
shook the actress's hand and smiled and wandered off with the
director, and I then gushed enthusiastically about Steichen rather
unknowledgeably. Given his love of beautiful and fascinating women,
Steichen was extremely gracious to let me continue to monopolize
the actress's time until her husband came to fetch her. I should
have made Steichen take my place at the table, but I was young
and enthralled and he, of course, had long since spent lots of
time with the famous and the fabulous and had not lost his sparkle
or his eye.